OFFICE OF CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY

RESPONSIVE INITIATIVES
5th Grade: Black Lives Matter
Intergenerational, Black Families, and Black Villages
July 2020
DIRECTIONS

Name ________________________________________________________________
Date _____________________________ School ________________________________________________

STANDARDS
NYS ELA:
• RL.5.11 Recognize, interpret, and make connections in narratives, poetry, and drama,
ethically and artistically to other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events,
and situations
• W.5.11.b Recognize and illustrate social, historical, and cultural features in the presentation
of literary texts
NYS Social Studies:
• 5.6c Across time and place, different groups of people in the Western Hemisphere have
struggled and fought for equality and civil rights or sovereignty.

Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles (10 min)

Discuss these principles and have students talk about how they connect to them
• Black Villages is the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the
“collective village” that takes care of each other.
• Collective Value means that all Black lives, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity,
gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or
disbeliefs, immigration status, or location, matter.
• Loving Engagement is the commitment to practice justice, liberation, and peace.
• Restorative Justice is the commitment to build a beloved and loving community that is
sustainable and growing.
VOCABULARY (20 min)
Read and discuss the following vocabulary words and complete at least two Frayer Models
• Intergenerational: We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the ability to
lead and learn.
• Black Lives Matter declaration on Intergenerational: We are committed to fostering an
intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people,
regardless of age, show up with capacity to lead and learn.
 • Black Families: We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate
with their children. We do that so parents – especially mothers who are sometimes
expected to stay home with children – can be part of the movement.
• Black Lives Matter declaration on Black Families: We are committed to making our spaces
family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We are
committed to dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double
shifts” that require them to mother in private even as they participate in justice work
• Black Villages: We are a community; we support each other and help each other. We are
united like family, even if we don’t live together or aren’t related by blood.
• Black Lives Matter declaration on Black Villages: We are committed to disrupting the
Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as
extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our”
children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.
FRAYER MODEL

TEXT (10 min)

Read the text aloud to the students or allow them to read independently
Civil Rights Activism, From Martin Luther King To Black Lives Matter
(Teacher: You can also listen to the transcript (5 minutes), by clicking on the link below)
Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/01/18/463503838/civil-rights-activism-from-martin-luther-
king-to-black-lives-matter

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad of New York Public Library speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about the
parallels between the civil rights movement and the current Black Lives Matter protests.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

On this day, when we remember the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S.
is in the middle of another racial struggle, the Black Lives Matter movement. Dr. Khalil Gibran
Muhammad has studied the parallels between these two movements. He's the director of the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Welcome.

KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: Thank you much for having me.

SHAPIRO: It's easy to look at these two movements half a century apart and say they're the fruit
of the same tree. How much similarity really is there between Dr. King's civil rights movement and
the Black Lives Matter movement of today?

MUHAMMAD: There's a lot of similarity in recognizing that there are huge disparities that exist in
this nation and bringing attention to those disparities in ways that are about visibility for the
suffering of the others and something that Dr. King called a confrontation with strength and
dignity. The notion of nonviolent is the cornerstone of the early civil rights movement. It was not
a nonviolence by birth. It was a nonviolence by training, and the young people of that movement
of 50 years ago committed themselves to understanding the movement so that they could inspire
others. The young people of the Black Lives Matter movement are doing the same, except their
audience is a national audience through social media as well as the local organizing that goes on.
But I will add this. They are fundamentally committed to moving past what they call respectability
politics. They want to suggest that the work of transforming America now means that everyone is
entitled to their human dignity and their due process. And if they don't speak perfect English, if
they've not graduated from high school, they still deserve respect in this nation.

SHAPIRO: There also seems to be a difference between sort of whether you're looking inward or
outward, whether the message is directed towards the community itself or towards those who
are interacting with the community.

MUHAMMAD: There's no question that the Black Lives Matter movement has dual messaging. On
one hand, it is incredibly explicit in ways that are not nuanced. In some ways, on this Martin
Luther King Jr. holiday, we really remember the best of his rhetorical genius and capacity to make
us feel good about what we were capable of. The Black Lives Matter movement is not interested
in that right now. They're really interested in wrestling with the litany of disparity data on how
blacks are treated in the criminal justice system versus in public schools, so on and so forth. In
that way, they reject some of the ways in which they've heard a lot of the aspirational rhetoric. So
that's a commitment to truth-telling in a way that Dr. King was much less likely to do on the grand
stage than he was in some of the churches that he spent so much time in.

SHAPIRO: You know, we're talking about these two moments in time, from the 1960s and the
present day, but there's obviously a continuity. How do we connect what's happened in the
intervening half-century between these two movements?
MUHAMMAD: On one hand, we didn't take Dr. King's warning about the importance of history
lessons. When he wrote "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?" he wanted us to
learn from what had worked in the civil rights movement and the work that remained necessary
to do. That got watered down somehow. I will say for my generation of Gen Xers (ph), we were
told, generally speaking, to just look forward - don't look back - and to embrace all the
opportunities that are right in front of you. I think we got ahead of ourselves. I think the fact is
that we needed to be vigilant and take more seriously that Dr. King didn't die of old age. He died
because he was assassinated, and he was assassinated in part because he challenged this nation
to restructure its fundamental values, and those values include the full recognition of the dignity
of black people. That is the work that remains today.

SHAPIRO: Do you think Dr. King would look at this movement today and heave a sigh that in 2016,
these are still contentious issues? Or would he be proud that the fight continues, and the ball is
moving forward, and people haven't given up the struggle?

MUHAMMAD: All of the above.

(LAUGHTER)

MUHAMMAD: At every step along the way from 1955 and the bus boycott movement until his
dying day, he had to make a case not just to politicians, not just to a broader community of
Americans, but to other activists in the movement itself when he said a legal strategy is
insufficient. He told the NAACP and other organizations we can't just win this in court. We've got
to transform this society. And so I think he would applaud so many people today who see that the
work is still beyond our courts, still beyond our politicians, and he would most certainly say to
them, like so many have said to me over the years; up in Harlem, the struggle continues.

SHAPIRO: Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Thanks so much for speaking with us, and happy
MLK Day.

MUHAMMAD: Thank you, Ari. Same to you.

 PROCEDURAL STEPS (30 min)
Complete the following activities with students
1. Americans are Skeptical of BLM Today, as they Were of the Civil Rights Movement. Use the
following YouTube video to connect to the text and to answer the related questions in the
Activity section. Watch the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bajF5-
05vpA&feature=youtu.be

After reading the text: Civil Rights Activism, From Martin Luther King To Black Lives Matter,
Answer the following questions:

Discussion Questions (can be answered verbally or written as short responses):

1. According to Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad what are some of the similarities and
differences between the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and Black Lives
Matter?

2. How do you think that the challenges for Black Lives Matter compare to the challenges
faced by Dr. King and those involved in the Civil Rights Movement?

3. Should young people involved in BLM learn from and work with older generations or is it
important for them to work independently?

4. What myths of the Civil Rights Movement does the video correct?

5. What is the difference between memory and history? Why do you think so many people
today have a memory of supporting the Civil Rights Movement but history show they did
not at the time?

6. What might this mean for the Black Lives Matter Movement?

SUMMARIZING ACTIVITY (5 min)

Complete the following final activity with students

Individually, respond to the following prompt:

Do you feel like you have a community or a “village” beyond your family? Where do you find a
sense of belonging, where you know people are looking out for you? What do you think about our
society being organized into separate, nuclear family units?wing final activity with students